Seeds
My digital garden is hosted at https://notes.bmannconsulting.com. Below are some pathways into the garden, and seeds of ideas and concepts. You can also browse the note representing this page directly.
Recent
- Lots of Mastodon, Bluesky and general future of DecentSocial
- The dark forest and cozyweb are important concepts for thinking about the web today
- I think a lot about commons funding. I haven't done enough original writing about it. Open Collective is a great platform I recommend for managing funding and disbursement, without needing a foundation or organization of any kind.
Seeds
To sum things up, we’re trying to run a planetary society that needs to solarpunk the fuck out of itself in a hurry on the collective intelligence of an 18th century principality that’s heard of the Enlightenment from some guy at the pub.
— The Internet Transition by Robin Berjon governance
It’s so powerfully obvious to me, it might as well be written in ten-foot letters of flame: the platforms of the last decade are done.
I said it in April 2022, and I believe it even more today: their only conclusion can be abandonment; an overdue MySpace-ification.
— A Year of New Avenues, by Robin Sloan
Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, and very vulnerable to bitrot.
— The Extended Interent Universe, by Venkatesh Rao dark forest cozyweb
Software companies founded today are competing less with pen and paper than with other Internet-first incumbents. Put another way, as happens in every maturing industry before it, Internet company revenue will become zero-sum. As a corollary, the time between founding years of software startups and their competitive incumbents is shrinking: